WSJ Benefitting from Demise of US Newspaper Industry?

Someone has to be profiting from all this bad news we suppose, though considering how much News Corp’s stock price has dropped since acquiring the Dow Jones last year one wonders if the WSJ can really claim to be the winner in all this. But maybe they can, all things considered. Journal managing editor Robert Thomson certainly sounds optimistic in a lengthy interview he’s given to the Murdoch-owned Australian:

“I think we are benefiting from [the demise of others]. One of the reasons our core circulations are rising so strongly is because papers around America are diminishing…And whether it’s in San Francisco or Los Angeles or Detroit, it creates a tremendous opportunity for us to gain readers who are increasingly internationally aware and also aware of their need to be well informed about the world.

As for the Journal‘s online presence…

Thomson says the Journal‘s website has doubled in size since News acquired the company. It now has about 23 million unique visitors each month, so it is now “one of the biggest sites in the world”. “There is no doubt it will be bigger than The New York Times site and it’s already the biggest core financial site with origins in a newspaper,” he says.

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As for the print product, Thomson says that when News bought the Journal the core circulation was “in some difficulty”.

“We realised we had to test how much people would pay for the Journal because too many readers were paying too little. Thankfully we have passed that test with flying colours.”

Thomson says they are now successfully increasing both the cover price and circulation (“print sales are up strongly”).